Keynote Speakers

Ricia Anne Chansky is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez and the Director of the Oral History Lab @UPRM where she leads projects funded by the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Council of Learned Societies, and she directs the UPRM team of the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico. She was named an Assembling Voices Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics at Columbia University, the Senior Climate Justice Fellow at the Humanities Action Lab at Rutgers-Newark, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Latin America and the Caribbean at York University, and a Global Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies in the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Her research focuses on developing climate communication strategies through data curation; analyzing disaster rhetorics in crisis oral history and comparative longevity studies; building university-community collaborative projects, especially those working to undermine intergenerational colonial practices and environmental racism; designing disaster pedagogy; and understanding oral history as mutual aid. She is actively working on projects involving energy justice, land and water protection, multimodal public history, and narrative as resistance. Her current book projects are a coedited collection, Archiving Puerto Rico: Digital Time and the Temporalities of Disaster, and a single-author volume on narrating disaster. Recent publications include The Divided States: Unraveling National Identity in the Twenty-First Century; Mi María: Surviving the Storm, Voices from Puerto Rico; and Maxy Survives the Hurricane / Maxy sobrevive el huracán. She is a member of the “Living Knowledge: Community-Centered Approaches to the History of Science” working group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and a Fulbright Specialist in American Studies. She was recently recognized as a “Big Better” by the Rockefeller Foundation for her work on climate justice and as an International Climate Justice Advocate by the Museum of Tolerance/Simon Wiesenthal Center. She is featured in the museum’s interactive Social Lab as one of four activists whose work is highlighted in the Global Crisis Center section.